OpenEMR Home Page
OpenEMR is a free medical practice management, electronic medical records, prescription writing, and medical billing application. These programs are also referred to as electronic health records. OpenEMR is licensed under the General Gnu Public License (General GPL). It is a free open source replacement for medical applications such as Medical Manager, Health Pro, and Misys. It features support for EDI billing to clearing houses such as MedAvant and ZirMED using ANSI X12. Medical claim and accounts receivable are accomplished through SQL-Ledger, which has been customized. Calendar features include categories for appointment types, colors associated with appointment types, repeating appointments, and the ability to restrict appointments based on type. There are customizable medical encounter forms, support for voice recognition software, electronic or scanned digital document management for records, and support for HL7 messages.
The community is dedicated to guarding OpenEMR's status as a free, open source software solution for medical practices. Its members are comprised of software developers, as well as physicians and those with extensive medical and billing knowledge, all with the common goal of making OpenEMR a viable alternative to its proprietary counterparts.
Our mission - Built on a tradition of continuously sharing, changing and improving, the OpenEMR community strives to work together to create a high-quality electronic medical record and practice management system. Through open collaboration, the community is molding a stable, yet continuously improving product, thanks to the efforts of developers across the globe, brought together by their tenacity and the connectivity of the Internet.
History
OpenEMR was originally developed by Synitech and version 1.0 was released in June of 2001 as MP Pro (MedicalPractice Professional). Much of the code was then reworked for HIPAA compliance and improved security, and the product was reintroduced as OpenEMR version 1.3 a year later, in June 2002.
The project, now open source, evolved through version 2.0 and the Pennington Firm took over as its primary maintainer in January of 2004.
Pennfirm did a good job of making the medical community more aware of OpenEMR, and as more developers and users became active in making improvements (Sunset Systems was the most prolific of these), the project's code base was moved to SourceForge in March of 2005, where it remains today.
OpenEMR is one of the most popular free electronic medical records in use today. SourceForge has recorded over
23579 downloads to date. In fact Brady Miller's Virtual Appliance and the PennFirm version are all the same version of OpenEMR. These projects together total 23579 downloads to date. This is over ten times the number of downloads of the similar projects listed on SourceForge. In the last 5 months the OpenEMR has been averaging 1144 downloads per month.
OpenEMR is one of the most versatile electronic medical records and operates in Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS X and MS Windows.
OpenEMR enjoys some of the broadest user support and developer support. Currently there are practitioners in the United States, Puerto Rico, Australia, Sweden, Holland, Israel, India, Malaysia, Nepal, and Kenya that are either testing or actively using OpenEMR for use as a free electronic medical records program.
The development group has professional developers, security specialists, and physicians involved in the development process. Open Source Medical Software is a not-for-profit company that supports OpenEMR and its development.
For New Users:
When registering, the username is the name you log back in with. The display name is what other users will see.
Getting registered initially can be a bit tricky. The easiest way is to pick the username and screen name to be the same. If you're having trouble getting registered please e-mail
drbowen at charter.net.
Recently I have been registering the new users by hand. Please contact me if you are having trouble logging on. Sam Bowen, MD
Posted 08-24-2007
OpenEMR version 2.8.3 has been released and now available on the download page. Rod Roark has started integrating the billing features into OpenEMR so that FreeB, PostgreSQL and SQL-Ledger will be optional installs and not required. FreeB 0.13 is being maintained to allow backwards compatibility with installations that are using FreeB to do their billing.
Please e-mail me at drbowen at charter dot net. if you have questions or problems with the site.
Sam Bowen, MD
www.oemr.org
